Crappy comparison of Amiga 1200 vs Atari Falcon

[pyrre]

Trolling was my first thought also. There is no next generation Amiga talk so I figured there was a logical explanation. I refrained from using the word troll but I still made a joke of the "inconsistency" .

The whole tread was about A1200 VS Falcon....
what is then wrong in airing some thoughts about the A1200 and what it could be capable about with minimum expense?

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Trolling.... WTF

Is it no longer possible to have any conversation with fellow amigans withoug getting flamed....?

OMG, dude.  Here in the rational world, it is hard to rectify your sig (which lists many highly expanded Amiga's) with your comment of (quote) "pretty much stuck with the 14mhz speeds then."  I'm going to assume that English is not your first language, which is just fine, but if I said "Oh woe is me, I'll never be able to expand my Amiga beyond 14MHz!" and then list such powerful systems as in your signature, it's a head-scratching oxymoron, to say the least.

Or maybe we're just all old and cranky and hate seeing people who should know better asking absurd questions.

And now I need another cup of coffee.  Cheers!  

[pyrre]

OMG, dude.  Here in the rational world, it is hard to rectify your sig (which lists many highly expanded Amiga's) with your comment of (quote) "pretty much stuck with the 14mhz speeds then."  I'm going to assume that English is not your first language, which is just fine, but if I said "Oh woe is me, I'll never be able to expand my Amiga beyond 14MHz!" and then list such powerful systems as in your signature, it's a head-scratching oxymoron, to say the least.

Or maybe we're just all old and cranky and hate seeing people who should know better asking absurd questions.

And now I need another cup of coffee.  Cheers!  

Oh wow.... I was referring to A STOCK A1200, as mentioned in the post...
What can possibly be done to an A1200 without buying expensive accelerators...

How can you relate that to my expanded a1200? the post was about stock machines....
if you cant understand something as simple as to stick with the tread... then WTF???

its best to stop here.....

[Blizz1220]

Well you could mess with the crystal I guess but you would need
that 14 Mhz 020 to go to 28 (a little too hot probably).

What they should have done is put 68EC020/20 Mhz in there and
make it run at 28 Mhz and put at least 2 Mb fast ram as default.
Other mistake was 2.5" IDE connector as 2.5" IDE hard drives were
most expensive at the time , SCSI was much cheaper but 3.5" IDE
were way cheaper.

What they did is make companies who made software stick to 14 Mhz
2 Mb slow Chip Ram as default configuration and floppies.

If they did it that way it would be 4 x faster than stock A1200 and
software would be made for that speed.It's only 1/2 speed of 030/50
but it's 4 x fast as stock.

[matthey]

I would have loved a 56001 DSP on the A1200. I think they missed the boat in just sticking with Paula. And thats why the Atari produced numerous Cubase revisions.

I wanted the Amiga to have a DSP at one time also. As my understanding of processors has increased, I think the Amiga would have been, and would be, better off with more general purpose and flexible processors. A DSP would have offloaded the CPU for audio processing but, IMO, a faster or better CPU, fast memory and a larger Amiga custom chip audio buffer would have given us faster computers and better software today. The key difference is that a program can be compiled and instantly takes advantage of a faster CPU and better memory while doing the same with a DSP gives no advantage. Perhaps a DSP (and some Paula enhancements) would have attracted some professional audio enthusiasts and software developers back in the day. Perhaps there would be a few assembler coders trying to use the DSP today to do tricks like the Falcon DSP is used for. The Amiga received better high end software eventually because of high end 68k processors but then lost out because there were no more new 68k processors to take it higher and compete with faster processors. Today, a DSP would never be put in a general purpose computer as they are limited in what they can do and difficult to program. CPUs today generally have DSP like instructions, specialized hardware and/or an SIMD unit which is more flexible. Superscalar, multi-core, multi-threaded and other parallel processing also reduce any advantage a DSP would have. A DSP can still be cheaper and draw less power for consistent and repetitive tasks. FPGA hardware has replaced DSP processing in many cases. The FPGA code could sometimes be classified as a custom DSP processor. Much more processor customization is possible today with cheap FPGAs.

The whole tread was about A1200 VS Falcon....
what is then wrong in airing some thoughts about the A1200 and what it could be capable about with minimum expense?

Nothing. It is not your fault we thought of trolls but the fault of all the trolls attacking in other threads. Our neural network minds are trained by repetition. I don't think Mike was accusing you of being a troll either.

[psxphill]

The thought goes:
Route the 28mhz signal from the oscillator directly to the CLK pin on the cpu. That should in theory run the cpu at 28Mhz.
and add fpu and 4/8MB trapdoor ram card....

I think it's unlikely that the 14mhz ec020 will run happily at 28mhz.

An fpu doesn't need to run at the same speed as the cpu, but all that surface mount soldering is not going to be fun. It's cheaper to just buy an accelerator (if you have the skills to do the mods then in the time you've spent tinkering with your a1200 you could earn money doing something else).

[paul1981]

Trolling.... WTF

Is it no longer possible to have any conversation with fellow amigans withoug getting flamed....?

I knew that you were referring to a stock A1200. They have been very rude to you. If anyone was trolling here it was definitely them with their ridiculous trolling accusations.

[jj]

calm down,  pyree was not trolling as far as i can tell.  i think it was you lot who have got confussed.  I knew straight away he meant that you would be stuck to 14mhz even if you tinkered with the mobo, not that he would never been able to boost his machine personally.  It is no wonder this site has become such an empty place, everyone is so eager to jump down everyones throats.

[Kronos]

Other mistake was 2.5" IDE connector as 2.5" IDE hard drives were
most expensive at the time , SCSI was much cheaper but 3.5" IDE
were way cheaper.

SCSI drives allways were expensive when compared to similar speced IDE drives.

3.5" IDE was no option:
- space (yeah I know they do fit, but surely not according to any spec)
- power consumption (add some RAM/CPU and drain a bit power at the ports and you'll have problem)
- most 3.5" drives at that time had problems sending there parameters, not a problem on x86 where those where strored in NVRAM after been read out at setup. 2.5" drive where much more reliable.

[psxphill]

3.5" IDE was no option:
- space (yeah I know they do fit, but surely not according to any spec)
- power consumption (add some RAM/CPU and drain a bit power at the ports and you'll have problem)
- most 3.5" drives at that time had problems sending there parameters, not a problem on x86 where those where strored in NVRAM after been read out at setup. 2.5" drive where much more reliable.

A low profile 3.5" drive, an uprated power supply and a buffered ide port worked fine. Yes it's not standard, but then plenty of amiga upgrades weren't standard.

[Kronos]

3.5" drives made in 1993 or later, or older drives >200MB work without problem.

But in 1992 and on a budget C= would have offered drives around 50-200MB and most of them would not have worked.

[Blizz1220]

I didn't have problem with most 3.5" IDE drives as long as they
were less or equal to 4 Gb although name wasn't recognized
from firmware partition program just worked on plain Kick 3.0
and original FFS.Off course I meant that they should have made
bigger case , stronger PSU and better support for those from
the start.

[psxphill]

But in 1992 and on a budget C= would have offered drives around 50-200MB and most of them would not have worked.

I'm not convinced that most 3.5" drives had broken identify responses, but if commodore had placed an order then the manufacturer would fix it.

What really kills your argument is that the A4000 shipped first in 1992 with 3.5" drives and they worked, so they would work in an A1200.

They used 2.5" drives for size and power reasons.

[kovacm]

The 68030 in a falcon has no way of accessing any memory at 32 bit. In the Atari world ST-RAM is equivalent to 16 bit chip ram and TT-RAM is 32 bit fast ram, the falcon (without an accelerator) only supports ST-RAM.

no.
at least, strictly speaking:
in Atari world how many bits RAM have does not determine it's name. Name is determinate if RAM is accessible by custom chips.
ST-RAM is ram that is accessible by custom chips (video, audio) and
TT-RAM is accessible only by CPU and not by custom chips

TT-RAM usually is 32bit but e.g. on Atari ST you can have TT-RAM (if you have more than 4MB) but it will be accessed also in 16bit and will be not accessible by custom chips (I think that it is same on e.g. Amiga 500/600: FastRAM would be no faster than ChipRAM coz it will be also 16bit and will be no accessible by custom chips).

So to get good performance you have to pay just as much for as an accelerator as you do on the A1200. Which makes the choice of 68030 rather strange. It's obviously a 68000 design with a 68030 shoe horned in as they only connect 24 address lines. The A1200 on the other hand can get 32 bit fast ram with just a cheap trapdoor ram upgrade. Although the A1200 is limited to 24 address lines unless you buy an accelerator.

memory read/write speed of stock Atari Falcon is faster than stock Amiga 1200:
Falcon ST-Ram R/W 32bits (MB/s): 5.345 / 6.488 (nembench)
Amiga ChipRam R/W 32bits (MB/s):  3.020 / 5.330 (SysSpeed)
Amiga access ChipRAM RAM in 32bit at ~7MHz and Falcon access ST-RAM in 16bit at 16MHz. Videl (video chip) access ST-RAM in 32bits burst mode. ChipRAM in Amiga 1200 is 250ns and in Falcon 120ns.

BUT on Amiga you could easily (and cheaply!) add FastRAM and outperformance Falcon in memory performances (with FastRAM A1200 should be two times faster?)!

Which makes the choice of 68030 rather strange.

Reason for 68030 is probably MMU so MiNT (MultiTOS) could use memory protection.

and btw MMU in Falcon made X68000 emulator possible
Cho Ren Sha - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voiRnr72YhQ
Pac-Mania - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HELyQzBSB9M
Galaga 88 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOH_uMRSrDY
and in future maybe NeoGeo if Anima summon some dark magic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxPCYeHtg60

[kovacm]

Don't forget that the Falcon was also horribly crippled by it's SW (read TOS) which allready was in legacy hell as it wasn't really planned for multitasking or HW expansion.

GEMDOS / TOS from start have support for Accessories.
Accessories are programs that are available from main application so TOS from start could run few programs at same time. Basic for multitasking was there from start but roas was long!
Eventually Atari got three major multitasking OSs: MagiC!, Geneva and MultiTOS (MiNT). Latest have even memory protection.

More about evolution and insides about TOS: http://www.fultonsoft.com/category/atari-st/revisiting-gem-for-the-atari-st/

Plenty other fields were a stock Falcon was utterly useless compared to a stock A1200.

not sure why Falcon would be useless in any field?!

here you have Atari software database with screenshots and some animations: http://milan.kovac.cc/atari/software/

there are software for any field!

[NorthWay]

Amiga ChipRam R/W 32bits (MB/s):  3.020 / 5.330 (SysSpeed)

No. Just no. Don't use crappy software when you want to get your facts right.
The hw bandwidth is 7MB/s read/write. Use 'bustest' to check how good your cpu is at getting the full bandwidth (I can't remember what the plain 1200 does, but it should be close to the theoretical max).

Just looking at the sysspeed page linked shows so many baloney numbers that you have to shake your head. Please don't use syssped if you want to check Amiga memory speeds.